It’s that time of year: Time to send out those annual holiday greetings.
Dec. 9 is considered the annual starting point for the Christmas card tradition, a chance, if nothing else, to communicate with family and friends we might not even see during the year. It says, “We’re thinking of you,” frankly, without much thinking required.
All it requires is heart.
The gesture of sending a Christmas card – in an age when text messages, emails or Facebook posts now extend greetings for us – can brighten a day. It can also cost a few bucks when you consider a first-class stamp is 73 cents.
The cost of a regular greeting card these days is also steep, anywhere from 50 cents – good luck finding those – to $10. Nonetheless, Americans purchase about 6.5 billion of them each year, with sales estimated between $7 and $8 billion, according to the Greeting Card Association. Birthday cards are the top sellers.
About 75% of consumers who send holiday cards indicate they do so because they know how good it feels to receive a greeting that isn’t virtual. At the top of the list are Christmas cards, with some 1.3 billion units purchased on average each year, including boxed cards, the association reports.
The Christmas card tradition goes way back, to 1850, according to the National Day Calendar. That’s when Louis Prang emigrated from Prussia and opened a print shop in Boston. He was a lithographer whose wife convinced him to produce floral Christmas cards; the first ones appeared in 1875.
The post office issued its first Christmas stamp more than 60 years ago, according to the calendar, a 4-center with Christmas 1962 printed across the bottom.
Christmas greetings can take various forms. But one benefit of social media is that it can make it easier to send out popular photo cards: You simply download an image and send it to your favorite pharmacy or store, buy dozens of copies, and adhere stamps to them until you’ve run out of saliva.
Anything goes with these cards, including the family pet. Messages are entirely personal.
Some people send Christmas letters that highlight their year with news of children and grandchildren, trips and career milestones. They can be affixed to a postcard or sent by traditional mail. They are a throwback, of course, to the days when letter writing was more in vogue, but are greatly appreciated by someone who doesn’t use social media, such as grandparents or old friends.
Postcards can send the same Christmas message as regular-size cards do, but without a fold or an envelope. They often have a photo on one side and a simple message on the other, and are cheaper to mail. Some merchants choose to send creative business cards as a way to be remembered by customers when they start holiday buying.
As for a holiday message itself, Good Housekeeping has a list of 110 suggestions, from the humorous – “Now we don our ugly sweaters” – to the religious and romantic. But the most familiar messages go something like this: “The gift of love. The gift of peace. The gift of happiness.
“May all these be yours at Christmas.”
